Dream – Plan (Prioritise) - Act
Planning is the key to moving forward to the acting stage, but if you don’t know where to start or how to prioritise you will fall at the first hurdle.
It seems from all of your feedback that the planning stage needed more attention, so this week, I thought I would focus on the most important part of planning: prioritisation.
As I said last week “…prioritise the small details to get to the big picture…” So what exactly does this mean? In essence it is arranging tasks or actions by their assigned degree of importance.
In Part 2 of Dream – Plan – Act I showed you my initial 10 item to-do-list which was the beginning of my plan to have a location independent business.
Let’s look at number 2 in a little more detail to see how I planned and prioritised – Turning my off line business into an online business as it was indeed the first step, without this possibility, I would have needed to find some other way to fund my dream.
This is basically what my brainstorming notepad looked like:
2012 (c) Kylie Pengelly. All rights reserved.
As you can see there were a lot of things to consider, but the most important was gathering more information.
Research was my starting point.
This is often the starting point in the planning phase so that the parts of your dream or vision that you aren’t sure about, can start to become clear.
Yet along side of this there were things I knew I could still do, like have a chat with my accountant, re-vamp my Facebook page and talk to a friend who designs websites.
Yes I know you are wondering how I prioritised all of these things as well as the new information I was getting from my research, which was a huge influencing factor.
Well here is my Top Prioritising Tip, it works with any type of to-do list.
Go and get yourself a packet of index cards, then write each task on a card and spread them out on a table or the floor, whatever space is required.
Now pick up the card with the most important task on it (go with your gut, you can always change it later!), look again at what is left and pick up the most important task, place this card behind the first card you picked up.
Continue picking up the most important task that remains and putting it behind the last card you picked up. When you finish the first card you picked up will be on top of your pack and the last card will be on the bottom.
Viola! You have your tasks prioritised.
Things will change as new information comes to hand, but it is just a matter of repeating the process with the new tasks to find your new priorities.
Simple and it works!
Next week a little further expansion on the Planning stage with a focus on research – doing the work yourself versus outsourcing.
Loading tweets...
2 comments
2 pings
Tennille says:
August 24, 2012 at 2:04 pm (UTC 9.5 )
Great article. I will do the flash card tip
Thanks,
Tennille
Kylie says:
August 24, 2012 at 6:51 pm (UTC 9.5 )
Thanks Tennille! It’s a helpful little trick when you can’t work out how to start!
Part 6 of Dream – Plan – Act » Productive Resourcing says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:59 am (UTC 9.5 )
[...] it included working out the true cost or saving of outsourcing and I gave you a simple tool for prioritising everything so the start was a no [...]
Part 2 of Dream - Plan - Act | Productive Resourcing says:
December 11, 2012 at 5:06 am (UTC 9.5 )
[...] Part 3 of Dream – Plan (Prioritise)- Act » [...]